[mythtvnz] Help spending my brothers $5K on MythTV

[Gary Te Young]

If you are spending 5K on a MythTV system, you deserve a quality system.
Recording TV using software encoding runs the risk of a sub standard
picture.

I started off with a TV capture card doing software encoding, it was the
cheapest option at the time.  I had an Athlon +1600 and it was great.
Monitoring the CPU with recording and playback it would hang around the 60%
mark which was acceptable but I found there were times when it would jitter.

When I would log in via ssh or use the MythWeb services sometimes it would
spike to 100% CPU resulting in dropped frames.  Now I'm not a perfectionist
by any means but when the whole purpose of a system is based around audio
and video, then they should be perfect.  Sometimes the CPU would spike to
100% when other cron tasks were running.

Using MythTV with 1 capture card was good but it opened my eyes for the
possibility of 2 capture cards and then 4.  My Athlon couldn't handle 2
capture cards with software encoding so I started down the hardware encoding
route.  After using a couple of PVR-250s I couldn't go back to software
encoding, they don't skip a beat.  I think with 2 capture cards my system
will run at around 5% and with playback around 25%.  This leaves me with
ample CPU for other tasks I may need to do (find, grep, vi, MythWeb, etc
etc).

I don't know if 2 Sky decoders are on the plans now, but it may at a latter
stage.  Wouldn't it be nice to know your system could handle this with no
problems frame dropping problems if you wanted to do this in the future?

Regards,
Gary Te Young
 
@Home Downunder Ltd
www.athomedownunder.com